Wednesday, March 26, 2014

In praise of journaling

When a lusty, ambitious young Scot named James Boswell
first met Dr. Samuel Johnson, Johnson advised him to keep a journal of his
life. Boswell responded that he was already journaling, recording "all
sorts of little incidents." Dr Johnson said, "Sir, there is nothing
too little for so little a creature as man." Indeed, there is nothing too little, or too great,
for inclusion in a journal. If you are not already keeping one, I entreat you
to starttoday.Write
whatever is passing through your mind, or whatever catches your eye in the
passing scene around you. If you remember your dreams, start with them. If you
don't recall your dreams, start with whatever thoughts and feelings are first
with you as you enter the day, or that interval between two sleeps the French
used to calldorveille("sleep-wake"),
a liminal space when creative ideas often stream through. If you have any hopes of becoming a writer, you'll
find that journaling is your daily workout that keeps your writing muscles
limber. If you are already a writer, you may find that as you set things down
just as they come, with no concern for editors, critics or consequences, you
are releasing descriptive scenes, narrative solutions, characters - even entire
first drafts - quite effortlessly. Some of the most productive writers have
also been prodigious journal-keepers. Graham Greene started recording dreams
when he was sixteen, after a breakdown in school. His journals from the last
quarter-century of his life survive, in the all-but-unbreakable code of his
difficult handwriting. First and last, he recorded his dreams, and - as I
describe in detail in mySecret History of Dreaming, they gave him plot
solutions, character development, insights into the nature of reality that he
attributed to some of his characters, and sometimes bridge scenes that could be
troweled directly into a narrative. Best of all, journalingkept him going, enabling him to crank out his daily pages for
publication no matter how many gins or how much cloak-and-dagger or illicit
amour he had indulged in the night before. You don't have to be a writer to be a journaler,
but journal-keeping will make you a writer anyway. In the pages of your
journal, you will meet yourself, in all your aspects. As you keep a journal
over the years, you'll notice the rhymes and loops or cycles in your life. Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian-born historian of religions, was a great
journaler. In the last volume of his published journals, he reflects, during a
visit to Amsterdam in 1974, on how a bitter setback to his hopes at the time he
first visited that city nearly a quarter-century before had driven him to do
his most enduring work. He had been hoping that his early autobiographical
novel, published in English asBengal
Nights, would be a big commercial success,
enabling him to live as a full-time novelist. Sales were disappointing. Had it
been otherwise, "I would have devoted almost all my time to literature and
relegated the history of religions to second place, even thoughShamanismwas
at the time almost entirely drafted." The world would have gained a
promising, and perhaps eventually first-class, novelist; but we might have lost
the scholar who first made the study of shamanism academically respectable and
proceeded to breathe vibrant life, as well as immense erudition, into the
cross-cultural study of the human interaction with the sacred. Synesius of Cyrene, a heterodox bishop in North
Africa around 400, counseled in a wonderful essayOn Dreamsthat
we should keep twin journals: a journal of the night and a journal of the day.
In the night journal, we would record dreams as the products of a
"personal oracle" and a direct line to the God we can talk to. In the
day journal, we would track the signs and correspondences through which
the world around us is constantly speaking in a symbolic code. "All things
are signs appearing through all things. They are brothers in a single living
creature, the cosmos." The sage is one who "understands the
relationship of the parts of the universe" - and we deepen and focus that
understanding by recording signs in our day journal. Partly because I keep unusual hours, and am often
embarked on my best creative work long before dawn, I don't separate my night
journal from my day journal. All the material goes into one book - a
leather-bound travel journal, when I am on the road. I try to type up my
entries before my handwriting (as difficult as Greene's) becomes illegible and
put the printouts in big ringback binders. I save each entry with a date and a
title in my data files, so I automatically have a running index. One of the things you'll come to see clearly, as
you journal dreams over a considerable period of time, is that your dream self
travels ahead of your waking self, scouting the ways. To write my new book, The Boy Who Died and Came Back, I mined my journals from many decades. There are fantastic dramas here, mythic trouble (and delight), times
of terror and beauty and possible madness, and tremendous trans-temporal
adventures in which sometimes I enter the situation of my counterparts in other
times, and sometimes they join me in mine. We bring each other gifts and
challenges, allies and adversaries from other times and other worlds. Reading over all these pages, I feel
sympathy and compassion as I monitor how younger Roberts tried to make sense of
all this while lacking any really helpful mentor in ordinary reality, and how
they struggled to keep body and soul together on the roads of this world. I
wonder, as I consider how “past” and “future” aspects of myself looked in on
each other and sent each other mental texts, whether my present acts of
observation are changing things in, say, 1987-1988. These journals are not
really old; they confirm the idea that the only time is always Now and that all
our pasts and futures and probable reality are accessible in the moment of Now,
and can be re-visioned and revised for the better.

1 comment:

"These journals are not really old; they confirm the idea that the only time is always Now and that all our pasts and futures and probable reality are accessible in the moment of Now, and can be re-visioned and revised for the better."

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